The thing that sucks right now: Without publishing any content in the first place, that documented strategy of yours is just a big huge guess.

That’s a lot of effort you put into an internal document that doesn’t directly reach your audience. And that means there’s absolutely no payout from it right now. :/

The startup solution: Start with clearly defined goal and a minimum viable plan. Give your team a purpose and let them loose.

Here’s something for you to chew on: Some people have a vested interest in selling you on all the reasons why you need a documented strategy. That’s because that is the service they sell you through content marketing.

Marketing plans are a nice way to make you feel like you’ve accomplished something without actually showing your audience the value. There’s no way to literally know if the strategy in your plan will be successful or not.

The truth is that you need to publish, analyze your success, and learn from your mistakes and successes to improve.

If you don’t ship, you actually haven’t started anything at all. At some point, your work has to intersect with the market. At some point, you need feedback as to whether or not it worked. Otherwise, it’s merely a hobby.

In reality, you can start now by simply defining your goal—the purpose—of what you’d like to accomplish with content marketing.

Then you can simply brainstorm the ways you could accomplish that goal, prioritize your project list, understand how you’ll measure success, and start creating content.

Our co-founder, Garrett, constantly reminds all of us at CoSchedule that:

The simplest approach is often the best place to start.

So this isn’t about creating content without strategy. It’s that your strategy can be as simple as focusing on inbound traffic to start because you can’t convert readers who don’t exist.

You can use survey data or blog comments to understand your audience without writing formal personas.

You can prioritize your projects using an Evernote note and a few bullet points instead of investing in a professionally-designed strategic document that essentially carves your project roadmap into stone without wiggle room to analyze what works and what doesn’t.

You can improve your strategy as you analyze the results from the content you publish.

From there, look at your content’s success or failure, learn from the data, and iterate.

This concept is an applied theory from Eric Ries, who wrote The Lean Startup. In that book, Eric mentions that startups can move faster with a simple, iterative process that helps your customers participate in building your product or service.

It looks a bit like this:

When you apply that concept to managing your marketing, it looks a bit like this:

Focus on publishing content and iterating on what you know really works. The best time to start is now.

Problem #2: Prevent Fires Instead Of Putting Them Out

The thing that sucks right now: You feel like you need to take on every project you get asked to help out with. It’s tough to say no to one-off projects when you’re seen as a service center instead of a strategic part of your company’s growth.

In other words, you can’t complete strategic projects because emergencies consume your work week.

The startup solution: Rock an agile scrum and sprint process that prevents your team from being pulled off of your strategic projects because of someone else’s lack of planning.

Startups are known for being disruptive. One of the ways they make sure they’ll ship on time is by following agile processes that keep them 100% focused on projects that will make a measurable difference.

A scrum master, most likely you, assigns the team the complete list of projects they’ll take on in a certain period of time. That’s usually the next two weeks.

The team works together to agree on what projects will get done, when they’ll be done, and how much effort it will take. Once the team commits to the projects and deadlines, they will ship on time no matter what.

When other hot projects come up, only the scrum master has the ability to stop or change projects in mid-sprint. That means that no one—not even your CEO—can steal time or take your team off the current sprint.

That means your team stays focused while you plan the new requests into upcoming sprints. That helps everyone focus on the right projects and gives you time to strategically determine which new projects to take on before you jump into executing.

There’s a saying I’ve seen around that goes something like this:

Your lack of planning doesn’t mean an emergency for me.

Plan your work. Work your plan. Avoid the fire drills.

Problem #3: “But That Would Never Work Around Here” And “Projects Get Thrashed The Day Before Launch”

Here’s a two-in-one for ya:

The thing that sucks right now: You just read through the solution to problem #2 and you thought to yourself, “Yeah, right! If I told our CEO that I wasn’t going to complete her project first thing, she’d be pissed.”

So the real problem is that you haven’t gotten approval to manage your team your way without exceptions.

The startup solution: Thrash your projects before you create them. Then get your sign-off—in writing if you have to—that you’ll ship your way and on your deadline.

Seth Godin has worked with huge corporate companies and came across this problem a lot in his early professional life. His solution?

Define the day you’ll ship. You’ll publish on this day no matter what happens.

Write down every single idea that could possibly funnel into your project. Get anyone involved who wants to be. Seth says, “This is their big chance.”

Thrash and dream. Seth says, “People focus on emergencies, not urgencies, and getting yourself (and them) to stop working on tomorrow’s deadline and pitch in now isn’t easy.” Help your team decide what they’ll create in the time frame available.

Enter all of your ideas into a database. Then let everyone thrash your project before you even begin. Seth says, “Make sure everyone understands that this is the very last chance they have to make the project better.”

Create a blueprint of all the remaining ideas that will funnel into your project.

Show the blueprint to the big wigs and ask, “‘If I deliver what you approved, on budget and on time, will you ship it?'”

Don’t move forward until you get your yes.

Once you get your yes, build your project your way and ship on time.

This process, as Seth outlines in Linch Pin, works well for both laying out how you want to manage your team (with sprints and the agile scrum process) and for managing single projects.

Get approval—even if you have to get something signed—then build.

In their book, Sprint, Jake Knapp, John Zeratsky, and Braden Kowitz explain that getting approval to create projects that are on point from the start and end with a thrash-free process begin with approval from a Decider.

In this context, the Decider is someone who has the potential to call shenanigans at the end of a project.

So Jake and Co. went so far as to get written confirmation that their project would ship on time:

In one sprint, the CEO send the design director an email that read, “I hereby grant you all decision-making authority for this project.” Absurd? Yes. Effective? Absolutely. This official power transfer added tremendous clarity…

While the process that Seth follows and the special design sprints that Jake and his team run are dramatically different, they have one thing in common: Get approval, then work. Ship on time, every time.

The thing that sucks right now: You have so many things you could do, you have no idea how to prioritize them. To top it off, you have goals—like selling more—but you have no idea what specific projects are producing the best results and which ones you should stop doing.

Problem #5: Your Content Approval Process Needs An Approval Process

The thing that sucks right now: The content you publish on a regular basis takes forever to finalize because you have too many people involved in your process.

The startup solution: Give total publishing authority to your editor. Take everyone involved in an “approval process” out of your workflow.

I’ve been loving a post from Jay Acunzo ever since he published last year. Jay used to work at Google where he saw a pod structure applied to the sales team, and he wrote about applying that same idea to a content marketing team.

Here’s a very memorable quote:

…team be huge, team be slow, team is gonna totally blow.

So Jay advocates removing any unnecessary people from your process and focusing on three key roles:

Strategist: You, the person who has the vision, knows what to measure and how to do it, and plans the sprints your team will take on.

Producer: The creative folks who actually make your content a reality. They turn strategy into assets.

Marketer: The person who shares your content with the world.

While you might have a few producers (let’s say a writer, designer, or videographer), you’ll notice that Google doesn’t focus on an approval person. The strategist—or editor—takes on that role by analyzing what works and what doesn’t.

Problem #6: Foster A Disruptive, Creative Culture

The thing that sucks right now: Your company expects creatives to maintain status quo, work in a drab office, and show up from 8–5.

Since you’re a creative reading about marketing problems, you probably don’t want to be doing whatever you should be doing right now…. so does being physically present in an office from 8–5 really make you more productive?

The startup solution: Value diverse experiences and working styles. Look for team members who have more ambition than you. Don’t track vacation time. Don’t demand that your team be omnipresent from 8–5 in the office.

Jason Fried gave one of the most popular TED Talks of all time:

You know what Jason found? Being present in an office does not necessarily equate to being productive.

Go figure.

Instead, look to build a team of people who have never fit in anywhere else. Find the misfits who just may work well together. They’ll be the ones who challenge the status quo to create something you never thought was possible.

So your designer wants to work from a coffee shop once in a while. Great.

Your marketer needs to work from home because day care fell through. Fine.

4 p.m. on Friday rolls around and the team wants to share a beer together. Excellent. That’s actually been proven to increase creativity, by the way.

Quit thinking there’s a difference between work life and personal life. It’s just one. And you choose to do what you do every day.